Making a budget is much harder than you think. I priced everything before we made any commitments or signed any contracts. But the problem for most people is, you're entering an industry you likely know little to nothing about.
For example, when my husband called several well drillers in town for a quote, they estimated roughly $5,000 for the job. They didn't mention, however, that they would not be supplying the pump for the well. That wasn't something we even knew to ask, so when we had them come up and signed that $5,000 check, you can image how surprised we were to find out that we needed to hire a different company to install the pump, and that cost another $5,000! The same thing happened when I called our local PUD and asked them to estimate a cost on digging in the power. We pulled up maps on Google, I told them exactly where the house would be, he estimated the distance and gave me a price of around $7,000. But he never thought to mention, and I had no idea to ask, that this price only included trenching in the rough power, it did not include hiring an electrician to actually hook the house up to the box. That was another fun little $3,000 surprise. So before we even had a foundation poured, we were already $8,000 over budget!
If you know nothing about construction, you'd better learn!! It doesn't matter who you hire or how expensive they are, you should never hire anyone to do a job where you can't tell whether they did it correctly or incorrectly. My husband is not in the construction industry, but he does know enough to get by, and thankfully his grandpa used to be a contractor. We were shocked to see how many subcontractors tried to slap together a job and run out before anyone noticed what a poor job they did. Here are some quick examples of mistakes that our contractors made, that a person who wasn't heavily involved in the building of their house might miss.
This is our foundation after the first pour. The guy came up, built and put up the forms for the concrete, and should have inserted the rebar. This contractor, however, somehow measured incorrectly. He poured the footings for the garage in the wrong spot, and had the forms for the pony wall hanging completely off the footing. This also made the rebar sit to the side of the concrete, and not on center. He never said a word of this to anyone, and our construction supervisor only came up after a job was completed, not during. Thankfully my husband knew this was wrong, and called our contractor. While they tried to stall and make it still work, the concrete guy came up to start pouring his poorly laid pony walls! My husband told him to stop, and not to continue any work until he talked to someone. He finally was able to contact the engineer directly, who was very upset to hear how the foundation was being poured!
We also contacted our county inspector who put in writing that no further concrete could be poured until the foundation was re-engineered and done correctly. Now again, it was a good thing that my husband took time off work to go down to the building site and watch the foundation being laid, because when they drilled in the rebar, he watched them slather the epoxy on the rebar and stick it in. That is not right at all!! If rebar has to be drilled in and isn't in the cement when it is initially poured, you must drill the hole, then blow the dust and dirt out of the hole so the epoxy can adhere to the cement and not the dust.
Then you are supposed to put the epoxy in the hole first, and finally insert the rebar. My husband came up behind them and was able to pull out all of the newly inserted rebar using just his hands. Is that the kind of foundation you want your house laid on??
This is a picture of the joists which will hold up our floor on the main level. Out of I think 28 boards, something like 24 of them were cut short. Now, the sub insisted that it didn't matter if they were short, it would still work, but we bought and paid for that wood. Those are our boards that he wasted, and whether or not it works, a job that we pay for ought to be done correctly. These guys were just being lazy, but once we pointed out that we knew they were being lazy, they started stepping up their game and made their cuts a little nicer.
Where the sheet rock meets the window is called the reveal. In my son's room, there is at least a 15 degree slope on the reveal. If he puts one of his trucks up there, it immediately rolls off. This is very poor quality craftsmanship, and several of our windows had very ugly reveals. It seems obvious once you've seen it, but if someone doesn't point it out to you, most people would never pay attention to the slope of the window sill.
These are just several of the snafus we had during our building project, but we were able to catch them because we had a decent idea of what we were looking at. I can't imagine someone who hires a contractor to build his house, and then steps back and never inspects the property again until it's all built! Believe it or not, many of the contractors we shopped had lines written in their contract that you are not allowed on your property until they are finished! It's just the same as getting your car fixed, or having surgery. Very few people take mechanics or doctors at their word, most of us want to make sure they're right before they do anything. The same thing should be done with your house. Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying to be rude or pushy or assume that everyone that you hire will try to cheat you. I'm simply saying that during the construction of your home, you will have lots of people working on it's construction. Some will be honest, hard workers and others will not. If you can learn enough about construction to keep up with what's going on, you'll be much more likely to catch the bad ones that come through.
Don't rely on your inspectors! Inspectors are great, they are your friend, no matter what your contractor might tell you. Their sole purpose is to make sure that your house is built correctly and won't immediately fall down two weeks after you move in to it. Buuut.... unfortunately they are human! They don't catch everything, especially during the summer months (building season), when they might be especially busy. Our inspector admitted that they tend to show up, check for a few obvious things and call it good. And of course, just because it's up to code doesn't mean it's the best possible job, it usually means just good enough to pass. It's good to remind yourself, you're not just trying to pass each individual inspection. Your goal here is to build a house that will last for years after you've moved on. Someday your house will be an old fixer-upper. Would you like it to have sagging floors and leaking windows in 10 years, 50 years or 100 years? The quality of work your contractors do will help determine the length of your homes overall life.
Be prepared to go sloooooow. As soon as you pick out that floor plan, your fingers will start Pinteresting, your mind will start decorating and designing and you'll be raring to get in to that fresh new house. But do everything you can to be patient! Fast work often means sloppy work, and if you catch sloppy work and make them do it again it will take even more time. Again, keep yourself focused on the bigger picture of a quality long-lasting home and not on the short term goal of just getting in it.
If you're worried about your house not being big enough, go smaller!Wait, what? I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but take a moment and think before you start adding those additional feet to your plans. Unless you're incredibly rich and can hire your housework out, remember that you will have to clean and keep up every square inch of that house. Every website selling house plans I checked out touted these massive 3,000+sqft houses with 5 bedrooms and a matching bathroom for each one. But who's going to scrub all those toilets? Who is going to dust those ceilings? You may have children now, but do you intend to stay in that house when they're gone? Our house is 2,334 sqft with 4 bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms and I am glad we didn't add a single additional square inch. I spend a lot of time cleaning, and sometimes even find myself missing our tiny 800 sqft apartment.
Also consider property taxes, light, water and heating bills. Can you afford to heat 3,000 sqft all winter long? I watched an interesting documentary once on lottery winners. Nearly all of the winners they followed ended up bankrupt within a few years. Why? Most of them bought large mansions with sprawling grounds but found that they couldn't afford the property taxes or the utility bills that came with them. Make sure your new house is a blessing to you and not a burden.
What lessons have you learned about building that you wish you'd known before you had started?
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